Former hostage tells 'Times' about being sexually assaulted in Gaza

Ilana Gritzewsky, who was freed on Nov. 30, 2023 after 55 days of Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip, spoke with the New York Times about being sexually assaulted as a hostage.

Gritzewsky, 31, was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz by Hamas-led terrorists during the Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack. Her partner Matan Zangauker, 25, remains in Gaza captivity.

Gritzewsky told the Times that the terrorists who invaded Nir Oz beat and molested her as they drove her to the coastal enclave. A gunman burned her leg by pressing it against an exhaust pipe, and another kidnapper groped her repeatedly, she said.

Along the way, Gritzewsky fainted and woke up in the Strip “surrounded by gunmen, half-naked, terrified and vulnerable.”

She woke on the floor in a building, with her clothes removed and surrounded by terrorists, she told the Times. She isn’t sure what occurred while she was unconscious but said that she gestured to the terrorists and told them that she was having her period.

“I felt they were disappointed,” Gritzewsky told the Times. “I don’t think I have ever been so thankful for my period.”

Over the 55 days, Gritzewsky was moved from place to place, mostly above ground, including in private residences ostensibly of Gaza civilians, in a hospital and, just before her release, in a tunnel.

One of the terrorists identified himself as a math teacher and another said he was a lawyer, according to Gritzewsky, who told the Times that the two stole her earrings and a bracelet.

She told her captors that she was suffering from a chronic digestive disease but was not given any medication.

Terrorists interrogated her about her mandatory Israel Defense Forces service, which she completed around a decade ago.

At one point, a captors hugged her and told her, while pointing his gun at her, that even if there would be a hostage deal, she would not be released, because he wanted to marry her and have children, Gritzewsky told the Times.

The Times cited Avigail Poleg-Dvir, an Israeli clinical psychologist who has treated Gritzewsky since her release, who confirmed the main details of her captivity, including the violence and sexual assault.

Gritzewsky told the Times that she also related the details to Israel Police detectives.

“I’m not really available for my own rehabilitation, not for the body and not least for the soul,” Gritzewsky said. “I live with the question of, ‘why me and not them?’ I have no answer.”

“But if I am out, it’s a sign that God wanted me to raise my voice to help those who are alive gain their freedom and bring back the dead for a proper burial,” she said.

On Dec. 7, Hamas released a video of Zangauker, Gritzewsky’s partner. While the three-plus minute clip was not dated, Zangauker said that he has been held captive in Gaza for more than 420 days, suggesting that it had been recorded recently.

“It wasn’t my Matan,” Gritzewsky told the Times. “He was thin, with frightened eyes, screaming from within to be saved.”

“It broke me, but it also gave me hope,” she said. “He survived.”

In an interview in March 2024, freed hostage Amit Soussana revealed that she was sexually assaulted. Several female hostages freed in the November deal have alluded to sexual abuse, but the interview marked the first time that a former captive publicly detailed Hamas’s sex crimes.

Soussana told the Times that she was held in a child’s bedroom in Gaza, chained by her ankle. On multiple occasions, a guard entered, sat next to her on the bed and groped her under her clothes.

Some two weeks into her captivity, Soussana briefly freed herself from the shackles to use the bathroom, and a guard attacked her. He forced her to “commit a sexual act on him” at gunpoint, she said.

At least 10 of the hostages released during the first temporary ceasefire were sexually assaulted or abused, a doctor who treated some of the 110 people released from captivity told the Associated Press in late 2023.

Israel is investigating many accounts of sex crimes that occurred during the Oct. 7 terrorist infiltration.

© JNS